NSFW Pod 018 - Kurt Krueger

Transcript provided by Descript via AI.  There are errors in the transcript, but it is provided anyways for reference and accessibility.

[00:00:00] Matthew Holliday: Good day, everyone. And welcome back to the not safe for work photography podcast. Today we're interviewing Kurt Kruger. Kurt is a very experienced photographer of nude, erotic and pornographic art, and he has published three books. How's it going to. 

[00:00:25] Kurt Krueger: That's going pretty well. This is my first day to get back on track after being on a nice long vacation. 

[00:00:31] Matthew Holliday: That sounds great. So Kirk did another podcast about three months ago on kinky cast out of respect for his time, we're going to try not to ask the same questions they did. So as homework, everyone should go listen to that podcast and get the background on how he got started in photography. I'll put a link in the show notes. 

And what I've done instead is to try and pick out a few areas that I wanted to dive deeper than that podcast. First question, we're going to start with an easy one. What's your philosophy of photography? What emotions are you driving for? 

[00:01:00] Kurt Krueger: Philosophy. That's not an easy one. My overall philosophy is to create a legacy. I have a real issue with the whole virtual world and I need things published in paper, on paper in books, on the books. Four people 200 years from now to find and maybe the other one spiraled them then, or maybe bids will just be, who was this guy? 

And I'll look me up. As far as my shooting philosophy, what I try to do is it's pretty much split 50 50 between a sense of arousal and a sense of humor. I lean towards comedy. I like to poke fun at the battle of the sexes. This person's pointing fingers at that person back and forth, and I like to poke fun at that. 

I like to, oh D well, keeping the models glamorous. I guess I've been inspired by certain photographers of the past. I like to de glamorize them while still being glamorous by pulling them down off their pedestals. So that's my sense of humor and I'm sorry sometimes people get offended with that, but that's just the way it is. 

They can pull me down off my pencil. They do it all the time. Anyway. So that's where my. Thinking comes in terms of creative creativity and. I like to do things that I don't see other people doing. For the most part, I'll try to come up with some, I'll see them. I follow a lot of photographers are collect a lot of photographers work and I'm amazed by it. 

And I could never even hope to accomplish some of it. But if I were to do some of their style, I would have to put my spin on that and add something that gives a little slippery twist. And usually that's a humorous story. That's not all of them. Some of them are serious, but very few really, I guess that's my philosophy. 

[00:02:57] Matthew Holliday: Yeah, there's a couple, I got a couple of followup questions for there. The first one is interesting about the humor. I'm thinking back. And we'll talk more about this book in a minute, but the erotic adventures of Amy one of the, one of the big feelings I got from it was like the feeling of a relationship, but you're right. 

In terms of the comedy, like a relationship involves it's usually a lot of joking around and a lot of comedy and a lot of photographers. Don't really, whenever they're doing erotic stuff, they typically take it very seriously. And that's not really representative of real-world relationships where there's usually lots of screw ups and lots of laughing and,  

[00:03:26] Kurt Krueger: Yeah people have always said to my shoots are fun. Cause we do a lot of laughing and joking and we, the jokes fly and this, the flub ups fly and misfires flying. All kinds of things happen. But yeah, we're usually always pretty much laughing except for the fact when I'm going through my shot list, I'll start to look at my watch and see, oh no, we're running out of time and I'll start to get up bit stressed at that point. 

Yeah, I can sense that they're feeling my stress and I've got to, after 45 years of shooting, I really still got to learn to just keep that on the low down my stress. But at that point I start slashing and burning the ideas. I started going through the less than just putting a line through them line. 

We don't need this one. We're going to use this. This is a duplicate, that kind of thing. And then whatever I have leftover, I'll bump that to the next shoot. If the model is the right type of model. 

[00:04:19] Matthew Holliday: That makes sense. I also find it interesting. You're concerned about legacy of paper versus internet. That's always something that they, tell kids these days is if you put it on the internet, it's forever, but that's not necessarily true. We've already seen this happen before, where stuff on CDs now is almost all gone. 

If it was on a CD, you can't put it on your computer anymore. Cause no computer comes with a CD.  

[00:04:38] Kurt Krueger: Yeah. I just went through this on my vacation, my daughter and I were transferring music back and forth to each other and I do have a removable DVD burner. And so yeah, I brought a bunch of CDs because I do still buy CDs. And so the sheet cause I raised her. And so we swapped things back and forth and I was just listening to a Taylor swift one in the car before we signed on. 

[00:05:00] Matthew Holliday: That's fine. Yeah. And then there's the other issue with the internet is frequently. When you find something you love trying to find it again as a pain, because the final names and the connections are all people can change it to whatever they want. 

[00:05:12] Kurt Krueger: My big issue with the whole thing is that, and I've heard this from moms. one model will be checking me out by asking another model. Okay. And and I'll hear this back to me. The other model will say he doesn't even have his own website. That's one purpose. Okay. First of all, I have had many websites. 

I've had several businesses S corpse, the whole shebang. And the thing is they never pay off. First of all, not really. And the second thing is once you croach and you stopped paying your bills, It's all gone 

[00:05:51] Matthew Holliday: Yeah. Unless somebody, yeah. 

[00:05:52] Kurt Krueger: evaporates into a different matrix somewhere. So it's not even real to me unless it's on paper in a book and I appreciate art on the walls. I appreciate prints and posters and art on the wall. Sure. My work. Lend itself to that so much in the occasional one does, but it really doesn't lend itself. 

Mine is specifically shot with books in mind to flip the pages and have a running theme though. So yeah, books are towards after may. 

[00:06:23] Matthew Holliday: Yeah, we'll definitely tell you. We'll definitely dive a little more into books in a few minutes, but one of the things I've seen you do in a number of your photographs is including yourself in the picture on a number of ways. That's not something you see a lot of photographers do. What kind of drove the decision by. 

[00:06:38] Kurt Krueger: it was a of necessity really. I'm much older than most of the models. All of the models as are most photographers actually. And I found that I had a very difficult time getting guys to pose in my pictures. Even with clothes on with suits, with tuxedos because they're afraid. 

What will their wives think? What were their girlfriends like? If they're staying at work, what if they're just afraid? And I guess shut up with that. I want to characters in my, and my shots I wanted to, so I gave it a. And I said, okay, I'm the only one available. I'm not, I'll delete, I'm old ugly. 

So I'll throw on a tox and I'll jump in and I'll just the spin on that. So I'm like, I hate to use the phrase dirty old man, I'm like the old guy, the old shoe Hefner type, the old something along those nature where I'm surrounded by these beautiful babes. 

I found that I liked it and had great fun with them. So I just continued with it. 

[00:07:41] Matthew Holliday: It's interesting. That does make sense, definitely simpler doing it yourself than hiring somebody else, especially if you're having trouble finding a that's actually we haven't had any male models on the podcast. It seems like they're either not very many or they're not terribly 

[00:07:53] Kurt Krueger: Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of people offering their services as male models, but they're wanting to do, they want me to just be shooting that, it's like, or they're looking to become the latest, greatest porn star or something like that. And that's not really what I'm looking for and it usually I want someone who's handsome. 

Who's good. Looking in a classical sense of sophisticated looking and I don't see much sophistication out there at all. 

[00:08:18] Matthew Holliday: Yeah, that's definitely on the drop days. When we first spoke, I mentioned your work reminded me a little bit of Terry Richardson. And you said you'd heard that a couple of times before. What specifically I've been thinking about it, what specifically I'm linking between your work and his, as you both seem more like you're documenting like a group of really interesting friends at like a small house party or like a super interesting life, rather than doing more art photography or abstract photography. 

And I think including yourself in the photo really lends itself to that interpretation. As well as your choice of location, background, lighting, the models you're using, like they're not boring. They're not like, Playboy models are not like fashion models. They vary there's to see it all seems very realistic and very things that can happen to real people. 

[00:08:59] Kurt Krueger: Yeah, I think that's a pretty accurate description of what I do. Yeah. I like the idea of I spent 25 years shooting on a seamless in New York and as Helmut Newton, he wants, famously said, people do not live on paper backgrounds. That really liberated my thinking. And I said, yeah, you know what? 

I'm going to stop doing that myself. When I had my greeting card company, which was an adult herd company and images, it was all shot seamless. And then for greeting cards, you needed to like just blank, static, much like a fashion magazine, some of those layouts anyway. But once I closed that business in 2006 and moved to Florida, I said, my God, I'm in Florida with the Palm tree. 

A little pink flamingos, I'm going to be shooting outside from now on. And by outside, I also made hotel rooms and all of that. I like to vary back and forth between high-end hotels and low end motels. 

I like that very sleazy look and you can get away with a lot more in the low end, wants to, they don't care. 

I don't care what I've shot in so many transient motels, where the sitting out and they know what's going on, I'll pop, you're walking in and the model will walk in and some of the yellow, Hey, you shouldn't put it in there. And I said, yeah, that's not necessarily always the case, but that yeah, sure. 

[00:10:25] Matthew Holliday: Now you just made me realize what that, there's a sheet that I was talking with a Fe about the other week and I realized it, it should absolutely be energy motel, like that would 100% suit kind of the idea and the. 

[00:10:37] Kurt Krueger: Oh, yeah. And I do like to, when I shoot there, as I said, while we were talking about that, I do work from a shot list. And during that shot list or through that shot list I do a couple of pictures of this category, a couple of pictures of that category, a couple of this one, and I worked my way down the list. 

And so it was resolved. It does look like a, if you were to put them all together, it would look like a party that's gone on. Yeah. But they get divided up into different categories and will appear in different books. So it doesn't all come together that way. But when you take a hundred different girls, all in disarray, in different hotel rooms, it becomes quite a madhouse looking thing. 

I liked that and I liked that the mixture of outside and indoors. 

[00:11:26] Matthew Holliday: Oh, yeah. Cause again, it's back to that quote, like people don't just live in doors. People don't just live outdoors. They live everywhere. You need  

[00:11:32] Kurt Krueger: try to capture it all. I still haven't done. I've been in Florida for 14 years and I still haven't done a beach shoot. Is it because there are no good beaches to shoot on where I am. I have to go over to the east coast over the haul over beach which is quite a Trek. That's an overnighter. 

And I post stories about that too, but I've never actually gotten there. Maybe I will. 

[00:11:57] Matthew Holliday: Yeah. Another common choice of object in your photographs as wine models. Is that a reoccurring theme for some. 

[00:12:05] Kurt Krueger: Yeah. Yeah, it is. We just. Dawned on me one day after shooting one or two of them have couple of different models. Hey, this is pretty funny. And then what I started to do was every time I'm in any kind of store, like a supermarket or whatever, I'll look at the labels of the wine bottles. And if there's a label to suggest something that they might be doing, I'll buy it and then I'll get the right person. 

I'll ask each person, are you willing to do this? Are you willing to do it? And more often than not, they are. Because it's so goofy. It's crazy. And so I help them, fucking wine bottles in various positions doing crazy things. And like I say, the labels most often relate to the action that's going on. 

[00:12:48] Matthew Holliday: Et cetera. I'm gonna have to go back and re-look at those. I didn't take a close look at the labels.  

[00:12:52] Kurt Krueger: A lot of them, most of them do most of them. Yeah. 

[00:12:57] Matthew Holliday: All right. So let's switch over and talk about books cause that's that's what you've been doing that I've been really fascinated with. Cause I think, probably every photographer wants to make a book at some point in their life, but you've published three of them. And your previous podcast with the kinky cast, you summarize the actual Genesis and photography of the erotic adventures of Amy. 

But for those people who didn't go back and listen to the other podcast, cause you give like a 32nd summary of how it came about. 

[00:13:22] Kurt Krueger: Sure. Sure. It was very simple. Amy and I, when I moved down to Florida, I was that won't say a big shot, but I had a pretty prestigious name with my greeting card company, prison images. I thought I could move down to Florida and just slip my foot right back in. No, it didn't work that way. 

So I had to join a couple of different portrait companies, a roving portrait companies to go around the state and shoot wholesome family pictures and churches, which is amusing to me. And I actually found that I enjoyed it. But. One of my partners. We had, were always teams of three and one of my partners was Amy and we worked together for about a year, maybe almost two. 

And we became good friends and I became the team lead and I was working on the book lips and I was very hesitant to ask her because. Fire for even asking a coworker this, but I asked her, which I showed her some mistakes, apples. I said, would you be willing to do this? I need a hundred girls. I need a hundred vaginas. 

Could, would you be willing to contribute yours? And she jumped on and said, yes. Okay, so jump forward a bit. We couldn't find the time and place to work it out because of scheduling problems. And so finally, we got assigned together to do 200 portraits of this place up in Sarasota. That's I don't know what you'd call. 

It was like the enterprise, but it was for old people and they turn over all their money to this place. And they live out the rest of their lives. And it was just the most bizarre thing. Now that basically had turbo lists and everything was crazy, but anyway, that's an hour and a half drive up. 

No, that's, I'm sorry. It's two hour drive up a two hour drive back. Then they wanted us to do it every day for five days. And Amy and I looked at each other and said, this is nuts. All right, we can't do this. We're friends. Why don't we just get a room together? We'll just pretend like we drove the thing and just, nacelle off, they walk in and that's what we did well during the first night. 

I asked her. Okay, we did that. We did the shot for lips. And so she obviously got naked. And there she was, oh my God, I didn't think this was actually going to happen. So all of a sudden I said, you know what? I have this book idea. I have a bazillion ideas. Do you want to just play around with it? 

To all kinds of crazy wacky things. And she said, sure that went on for seven days. All right. Then there was a seven days there. And then after that was over, she came back to my place, my house, and we shot for three days in my house. And then right on the heels of that, she moved out of. And that was that. 

But yeah, it was a very intense seven days in those hotel, two hotels. It was and three days back in my house and we got an incredible amount accomplished and she just didn't put the brakes on anything. The only thing she didn't want to have. Was having actual penetrative sex. She did not want to have that. 

So anything else was fair game though? Then she just went forward. It was great. 

[00:16:37] Matthew Holliday: It was really interesting listening to that story. And how you did it all in one big? It makes sense with the circumstances, most people, most photographers working in the models, I imagine do it over longer periods of time, but maybe not. That's the second or third time, I've heard a story, very similar to that where the photographer and the model got together for a very focused period of time to make a book. 

Is that more common for books? 

[00:16:58] Kurt Krueger: I don't know. I, when I see a lot of the books out there from other photographers and usually they're a one model, maybe a couple and the bores, it'll be nudes on a beach, nudes on an island. And basically it's the same picture, 20 times, 50 times. But I wanted this, we're going to do this. I said, I'm going to run back home for one night. 

I'm going to die. I got drove into my garage at 3:00 AM. All right. And I just filled boxes full of random props. I just grabbed anything I could see in my, my eye, my eyesight line of view. And I just piled the car full of crazy. And then I drove back up and I was groggy the next day on the job. 

But that night I kicked in and we got a lot done and you can see that cause people might say, oh, you did this impromptu. But look at all of these prompts on there. You were thinking about it. Not until we got there and I ran home and got all that stuff. 

[00:17:57] Matthew Holliday: So just saying, yeah, so like I said, I think most photographers toy around with the idea of making a book. So what was the process of actually create a not in terms of the photography, but in terms of like actually creating the book itself. 

[00:18:11] Kurt Krueger: I longed my whole life. I went to photography and film. And my initial goal in life was to be a filmmaker. And I wrote several scripts and I'm not going to get into that too much other than the fact that three of them were made. And my name is not on them. And there, they were pretty big time movies too. 

So I gave that all up and fell back on the photo aspect of. Oh, just became a photographer where I could control it all. It didn't have to rely on other people except the models, which is bad enough. So what was, how did you phrase your question again? I was getting off the track there. 

[00:18:48] Matthew Holliday: No worries. It was the process of making a book. Like I like not talking about the photography side, but let's talk about actually like turning it into now. 

[00:18:55] Kurt Krueger: Okay. So I longed my entire life to be able to publish books, but they were out of reach, a book companies like Tasha and Goliath. They're just out of reach. They have to accept you and they have to approve it. And they. Run, 5,000 copies or a thousand bucks or whatever it is just how to reach. 

And there's so many photographers out there. Who am I, why are they going to pick me? They're going to pick Richard Avalon. They're going to pick Helmut Newton. They're going to pick these famous people. Look at me. All right. So I'm lucky to have lived long enough for the self-publishing. To come alive and prosper. 

And so I went that route and I've been very happy with that. I made sure I'd love to have a thousand copies of my book out there. I don't have a few hundred of each. But. Somewhere down the line, people are going to find them and you pass them down through the generations and blah, blah, blah. 

They'll end up in tech sales and some side of the road barn that, there'll be there. But the process itself is quite simple. I use blurb and what you do is you just download their application. And it's a basically cut and paste. You can do templates of all man, or you they keep adding things just as much like Moscow on the Hudson, where there are too many choices on the shelf and you have a panic attack. 

They keep adding, the flat book layout and this kind of a play out and that kind of book laid out. They have a lot of the things for doing family albums and wedding albums and things of that nature, but they also have the art portfolio. Which is what I go for. And basically they, all the photos have to be in JPEG RGB format. 

Even if they're black and whites, they have to be JPEG RGB. The program won't accept anything else. So you just have to get them up to a decent size. And I keep all of my work. My final work is always, I just keep it at 20 megs. And that's the size of that size. Not going to get billboard out of it. 

It's fine. So when I squeeze it down to it it's really tight. So no problem there. And you just drag the pictures into the program, they go into a timeline at the top and then you just drag each picture down to the page. They give you a little boxes and you pick the type of box. You want you to just drag the picture down and if you have to move over to resize it, you can do all of that. 

And if you want to add type onto her yeah, you can do that. You can choose fonts and the whole bit. When you're finished with it, you upload it, which turns it into a PDF automatically. And when you do that, now you have to buy one copy at full price for yourself in order for it to be published. And so that's no big deal. 

All right. So you buy one copy for yourself, then you can sell it two different ways, actually three. Okay. If you count the. So one way is selling it through blurb, which you don't have an ISP yet. You're selling it through blur and there's a certain fixed price that you set to use that, and they take a little piece off the top and then, you point people to that patient. 

They can buy it right from blurt. You can get the ISBM, which they automatically generate for you. You don't have to buy your own $200 one for each damn product. I went through that with my greeting cards too. It wasn't, it was the UPC code. That's not the ISBNs. And then it was like $200 per card per styles. 

Ridiculous. So then if you'd go that. You upload it, you select let them do the ISB. And when you do that, then you can then sell it on Amazon. Now, Amazon jacks, the price immensely. And I want to tell people out there who might be wanting to buy my books on Amazon. It automatically leads you to the large version of my books is the erotic conventions of Amy being the main. And that's it's priced at 200 and something though. $260, 

[00:22:45] Matthew Holliday: I was just looking at that. Yeah. 

[00:22:47] Kurt Krueger: It's ridiculous. Yeah. What, I didn't want that to happen then I'm not going to do that with my next books. I put up a large version and a small version. They clump them together on Amazon and only promote the large version. 

No, one's going to buy that. So if you go on there, Click on other versions or other formats, or however it's phrased and go to the smaller version, then it's much more affordable. So that's the way to go on that. 

[00:23:12] Matthew Holliday: That's interesting. Yeah. Cause I was just looking at the blurb copy and then 

[00:23:15] Kurt Krueger: Yeah. 

[00:23:16] Matthew Holliday: And it said you could buy this at Amazon. I went to Amazon. I was like, wow. 

[00:23:20] Kurt Krueger: Yeah, I know. It's like really, I'm not buying that from Amazon. I have bought quite a few photography books from Amazon, but yeah, if I can find them on blurb first, I'll do it. And then they don't advertise the ebook on Amazon. That's only through blur and I get the same charts on every book, whether it's ebook or paper book or whatever. 

The book bothers me in that the preview doesn't show the whole thing. And also. Again, it's back to that. Poof, it's virtual, someone's going to cheap out and get a 1995 e-book you know, so they can sit on their laptop. What good does that? Do you know? It doesn't do me any good at all. 

[00:24:00] Matthew Holliday: I'm not a big fan of photography books on the laptop or the Kindle. All right. So looking back on the three books you published, would you say it was worth it? 

[00:24:10] Kurt Krueger: Yes. Yes. As I say it's all about my legacy. I want that feeling. That sensei something that creating something that outlives me, so that again, 200 years from now, someone will just run across it by accident and say, oh, it was this not. But yeah I feel that it was very much worth it as it was worth it financially to say, I didn't make a fortune on the tip of their page selves, certainly. 

And the pay for themselves multiple times. But yeah, I didn't get rich from it right then. Like that's not what I'm about. Not about the money. I'm about to legacy. 

[00:24:44] Matthew Holliday: that's interesting. You mentioned that the discovery part, cause that was one of the, that was one of my first instruction to federal books was going through like old used bookstores and they all had, they all have a photo section and they've all got a bunch of stacked photo books and, 

[00:24:55] Kurt Krueger: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I did that all the time until the cell phone until bookstores disappeared. Yeah. But I remember one time I went, my wife and I were on a trip somewhere other, and we ran across an open air to flea market. And under one of the tents this woman had. Six crates of photography books. So she was selling them all for 50 bucks and it was like, everybody you could imagine in there, Marco, Laviano Richard Avedon. 

Huh? How the noon, just everybody that you can think of. There was a book in there plus all the graftless of books from the seventies, all these things. So I lied to the entire book shelf full of, I had to build a bookshelf. Let's put it that way to house those slow down the 200 other books. 

I have photography books. So yeah, I have a ceiling, the floor, 12 foot. Bookcase full of mostly autographed monographs by photographers. 

Yeah. 

[00:25:57] Matthew Holliday: that sounds amazing. Yeah. That's definitely something that people are going to miss out on the next couple of decades. 

[00:26:02] Kurt Krueger: Yeah. Yeah. That's their loss. It really is. Although the books that I have will fall into someone else's hands too. Although my, both of my kids have zero interest in it. Oh yeah. It did not rub off on them. They're both very successful, but they want no parts of this. They saw this. They saw the struggle that I went through when they were growing up and I had braids and images and packing and shipping orders of greeting cards until 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM trying to meet missing vacations with them because I had a giant distribution order for Australia. 

I was short handed I'm down there, bagging dozens of cards, counting out envelopes and trimming the cards because the printer didn't do a good job. It was a real arduous task for 25 years that went from 1981 to 2006 from Christmas, 2000 at 1981 to Christmas Eve, 2006, exactly. To the day 25 years. 

Yeah, but they saw the struggle. 

[00:27:04] Matthew Holliday: So I'm about to ask you to choose which one of your children is your favorite? All three books were different. The erotic adventures of Amy was one place. The person one location and like very time-bound blips is many people, many places, but they're all thematically connected and faces of Hollywood has many people, but now you're in the same place. 

Which one is your favorite? 

[00:27:29] Kurt Krueger: Okay. I think that I'm going to refer to Hollywood on this, the Hollywood, the answer. When you asked, when you asked Harrison Ford, what's his favorite movie? When you asked Sean Connery, if he were still alive, what's his favorite movie? They would basically say they're all my children and they would say. 

The thing that they liked the most, when they look back at their own movies is not the frames that are on the screen, but the experiences they had off camera, they're standing at the food truck, next thing you know, The hot girl from the movie something of that nature, the relationships that they built behind the scenes, that's what they remember of those movies. 

That's what happens to me. So when I look at certain, I have one picture in there, for instance, for your thighs only, which is James Bond knockoff. And I look at that picture and I think that's, one of my best, I liked it. I'm still in touch today with that girl online. She's in politics. 

I'm not going mention who it is. I think back to how fun. To say, Hey, could you possibly see it in your heart to just get naked for me? So I can do this picture. That's a snuck up of this James Bond movie and she just burst out laughing. And, I gave her a couple of ideas about it and then sure, I'll do. 

And she was my next door neighbor at the time. So she came down to my apartment. This was in Manhattan and she came down to my apartment and stood on the table naked, and we got a few different pictures done, but that was the one that really stuck. That's the one I asked her about it was such a thrill to be able. 

And I did this many times asking a simple friend, would you mind getting naked to me for a picture and they'd do it. And that was really the thrill of a lifetime. Each time that happens. 

[00:29:31] Matthew Holliday: No. That's interesting. Cause I think that's definitely one of the things that stops a lot of people that dream about doing erotic photography is, asking people to do it. Cause it's such a transgression compared to normal interactions. 

[00:29:43] Kurt Krueger: Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Talking about limitations. You mentioned it earlier. What I do the way I work is, as I said before I do art nude, glamor, nude boy, girl, Roddick with me and the toxin and boy, girl out flat out X-rated I tell each model when I make first contact with them this is what I do. 

And here's where you can see what I do. Most of my work on Divia tarts, that's my main portfolio because I refuse to pay for a website. That's going to go poof and disappear. So I'm on deviant art for most of my workout. Over a thousand pictures on there, and then the ones that I'm not allowed to post on deviant art, because they do have their rules. 

I then post on chat legs. So my FetLife or the wash offs from DVR. And then there's a, full-scale. Equal to FetLife or way beyond maybe double fat life of stuff that I have not posted at all anywhere. And that's something that I'd like to talk about with models is matter of fact I have not posted anything for my last four shoots. 

And the reason I haven't is because they were meant for individual books along the lines of the erotic adventures of Amy, except for we were going to push it all the way. And we shot it all. We shot. Let me just tell you this quick story. I did three shoots with one mother who was very well-known who we as a porn star and very beautiful redhead. 

And we did three shoots and the fourth shoots, I went over the Miami set up, it cost me $3,000 to set up this shoot two nights over the. Travel buying props, wardrobe, wigs, everything you can imagine. And then the next morning she flaked on me. And so I waited for 15, 20 minutes. And finally I went to text her and say, Hey, what's up? 

And I found that I was blocked and I was blocked on text. And that was blocked on three Facebook accounts. And that was Bluffton. And it was blocked on email across the board. She flaked on me and I had texted with her at 10 30 the night before, 

And the next morning she flaked and blocked me in, on all those things. 

And to this day, I have no idea why we've had three marvelous shoots, got great pictures. I posted some of those, but when that happened, I stopped posting. Then at that point I was pretty much at the point of saying I've had it, I've had it too many flights too. I can't believe this happened. We're working backwards in the book too, by the way, we're going X-rated and then working back to glamour and then implied and then bitch, we were 

[00:32:33] Matthew Holliday: even weirder because I can understand if she realized like, oh, you know what, I've decided that my boundaries are actually here and I can't do that, but 

[00:32:42] Kurt Krueger: Yeah. Yeah. So we're going backwards. So all the x-ray stuff was shot. All right. And we were working backwards to the softer stuff. I almost quit photography at that point. I said, that's it. I'm going to have to post I've have to print, but to hell with it. All right. So then all of a sudden, another model pops up too. 

I said, oh wait a minute. Okay. This one works just as well. So I proposed the whole idea to her and she jumped on. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. All right. And so we did three shoots, working backwards, all the x-rays and stuff. And we got to the fourth shoot and I get a text the night before she's not coming. 

She's not getting on the plane. She doesn't have enough for an Uber. She doesn't have this, that whatnot, whatever. And she's deleting my contact information for her own mental health. Oh, so here. Two half shocked books, three shoots on one, three shifts on the other all pretty much X-rated with other ones scattered in there. 

A couple of, a couple of Softcard couple implied, whatever, but predominantly X-rated stuff to half shot books. What am I going to do with this stuff? All right. So at that point I said, never again. Am I going to try to duplicate what happened was Amy? It's just not going to happen. That was Matt. 

That was lightening cotton. That was magic, and you just can't, you can't buy laws, you can't buy magic. And these people, they say they're committed, but they're really not, and the flakes are abound out there, but I'll figure it out. I'll figure out some way to use I'll scatter those pictures throughout the other books that I have upcoming. 

[00:34:25] Matthew Holliday: Gotcha. Yeah. I'm just sitting here thinking about that, like that again, that level of commitment and then bailing halfway through, but that's how they have three shoots and then they probably asked him three more to go. Since you said you were 

[00:34:35] Kurt Krueger: Yeah, exactly. We were halfway done with three more to go and there was simpler too. Yeah, there was simpler. And then I posted comments about that on the shop. And of course you get the photographer to come back. Do draft the contract, 

[00:34:48] Matthew Holliday: Yeah. 

[00:34:49] Kurt Krueger: The contract's only as good as the paper it's written on. 

Yes. I can take the time and money and effort to Sue them. That's going to make a really good next fourth shoot. Who are we dealing with here? We're dealing with flakes. What's the point of that? You get the model releases for 2257 and all that when you're shooting a contract, come on. 

[00:35:07] Matthew Holliday: So speaking of paperwork, and I know this wasn't on our question list, but I don't know if you saw my tweet last night, but I was last night, I was diving into the 2257 stuff. And frankly, I was horrified. How do you handle that? And that worries, that was a tweet it's gone into the air Pinos. 

How many people even looked at it? 

[00:35:26] Kurt Krueger: Yeah I got my, a model release that I've been using for many years. And in this it's an extrapolation of Playboy and cat houses, original one modified to include modern media. All the digital variations and video and all that. And it gives me an exclusive rights to everything. 

I should say that whenever I work with a model, I always zip them, the finished products on the shots as I do them. And they're free to use them as they like, that's fine. I don't care. Even though, it might be a paid shoot and I don't need to, I'm not obligated to, I like to do that, but then invariably, somewhere along the line, Something goes south and someone stabs me in the back and it's says something negative or whatever. 

I don't know. And I just stopped. I just stopped doing it, but initially I send them everything and I tried to keep it cordial and congenial and cordial anyway. And no. It makes for a good working relationship until they fight, they gets lucky. They crazy. Maybe it's a new boyfriend or cat came into the scene. 

Who'd be gone in six months anyway. When they get their fingers in their 2 cents then, and mess everything up, you just never know what's going on out there. So I've gotten really sour and dire on backing any models. You know what I'm saying? It's  

[00:36:43] Matthew Holliday: And I can definitely, I that's one thing I'm glad of is that I'm old enough that when I was in my teenage and early twenties, the internet was not as fully formed as it is. And a lot of the stupid stuff I did online, then can't be traced back to me now. 

[00:36:57] Kurt Krueger: They can't dos. 

[00:37:02] Matthew Holliday: all right. How do you decide which book ideas to make around. 

[00:37:06] Kurt Krueger: As I say, when I do a shoot, I have a shot list and it's broken down into the categories. So I do have fine arts in there. I do have erotic. I do have X-rated depending on the model, of course, something going that far. And I always, like I say, I lay all that out ahead of time and I say, this is what I do. 

Where do you fall into that? All right. So if they say, oh, I'll do it wrong next. I'll just spread it out. The leg. I'll do that. Okay. All right. Fine. Whatever. I'll write to shoot. According to that, quite often, it will happen in my mind to shoot. Then they fess up and say, oh yeah, you can see me on PornHub or whatever. 

Yeah, so it's never, they're never telling the truth. That's the way I have to play it. I have to say, this is what I do. Tell me what you're good with. Tell me how far we can take this in one form or another. You do have to ask that question and many models get offended by that. Especially the art models. 

Who were so above at all, they have to do the ballet poses in the desert, and there's nothing wrong with those beautiful pictures, but how many of those can you have and how many photographers have done this same damn picture and how many decades of that same damn picture? Yeah, he gets sick of it. 

The only thing that changes in it is. And so she's got a nice picture of herself. Great. Go for it. Some of the models are like that and I want to know how far we can push it, but I always ask them upfront and I always run every idea past them upfront and give them the chance to say yay or nay. 

And explain. And what I also do when I do this, I do a four-page shot list for every shoot. All right. A script it's scripted up with a description of each picture, typewritten with a list of the props needed through that picture. 1, 2, 3, right down the line. Along with that, I also have some enormous scraps on it. 

And so I'm always able to pull some image that will give them. An idea of what we're going for, at least in toes attitude, something to give them a little direction, so they know what to do. Cause I do direct and I do consider myself a director of still photos. I am the director and they are the heart. 

And they're there, they accepted the script and they're there to do what I need them to do. I'm a Hitchcock. Do it the way I want it. And I don't mind if they put their own 2 cents in there. I don't mind if they, throw me an alternative or give me a different expression. Sometimes those are great. 

And those are the ones I go with, but get mine first. Okay. And then go for your spend. We'll go for the variation. 

[00:39:48] Matthew Holliday: Interesting. So it's it's interesting you comment about the PornHub and the other stuff, because that is one of the realities of kind of the creator market is now you can make a living as a model. The way that you couldn't before, but you can't do it as like a fashion model. You've got to do it as an erotic model. 

That's yeah. 

[00:40:09] Kurt Krueger: the interesting thing about this is the first girl that I was doing, the red that I imagined that I was doing a book and we did three shoots. She was a well-known fashion model, runway, fashion model, fashion mom. She was in Vogue. Beautiful, stunning, but she was also an anal porn queen under a different name. 

[00:40:29] Matthew Holliday: Interesting. 

[00:40:30] Kurt Krueger: And they're going. And no one knows the other. All right. And the interesting thing for me is that she did the first shoot with me under her real name signed. Yeah. And the second two shoots she did on there, her suit on them, her pardon name and legally, I have the right to use both names, although I never bought. But yeah, she got most of her money. She would get major shoe and appearance though, they throw her scraps, but she made her big box with being an anal queen. She was able to take three ticks at once annually. Yeah. 

[00:41:09] Matthew Holliday: know how that works, 

[00:41:10] Kurt Krueger: I don't either. I even watched it and I don't know how it works. 

[00:41:14] Matthew Holliday: All right. It looks like we are just about out of time. Unfortunately. I do have, I have one more comment and then I have one more question. So I did have a weird followup on the erotic adventures of Amy. I love the book because one of the things that I'm specifically trying to catch. Personally and my own photography and mostly family, not at this point, I started working on it, but like capturing the feeling of falling in love and have a relationship. And I think you really captured an affair or kind of a specific relationship that occurred in a specific time and place that I just love the way that feels. 

[00:41:48] Kurt Krueger: Yeah. And that did happen. Then despite the age difference, I was I think I was 59 and she was 25. We collect what we collect for two years as friends anyway. We definitely clicked and yeah, they went into we got pretty intimate. Yeah. And like I say, she didn't want those kinds of pictures in the books, so we didn't shoot them. 

Okay. And out of respect for her, I didn't yeah, it did become serious on that, in that aspect. And it was, I did a freely say I did fall in love with her. She was wonderful. She was, if you rank the models, I've worked. There will not, she would be the number one and she's not the most beautiful. 

She's not the best belt she's not, but she would definitely be the number one. She was one of those scenarios where it was asking a friend to get naked for you, which is just the pinnacle of it's just you'll have, rather than hiring a model and doing something by rote and, And that was something real. 

That was something real. And but she is a nomad and she told me right then and there in that hotel room, she was leaving Florida after the shoots were done and she was never coming back, hates Florida hates the south hates she's lived all over the place. Yeah, but I knew that was a finite time there, but yeah, that was really, that was real. 

[00:43:15] Matthew Holliday: Every relationship is a finite time and sometimes you just don't know when the end desk. 

[00:43:19] Kurt Krueger: Yeah, of course she gave me that definitely time and date. 

[00:43:22] Matthew Holliday: All right. For our last question, what's your favorite photo in your portfolio? And they can be deviant art or it can be. 

[00:43:28] Kurt Krueger: This, the same thing back to the home with thing. That's the whole thing is it's the experiences behind the scene. And it said since I don't really have a favorite photo, I have, maybe I have 50, the favorite photos. Yeah, I really can't pull that out of the hat. 

It really falls back on the experiences that I had behind the scenes. My, my memories of how the photo got created. And of course my favorite photos, if you have to choose the pat answer to what's your favorite. The next one. Okay. What's your favorite Coda? Next one. That's not always the case too, because right now I'm working on the picture that is literally 30 years in the making. 

My shot, when I was about living back in New York, I shot the picture of a statue that was up in a Christmas park in upstate New York. One of those Christmas Eve parts things, and I just recently completed shooting the people that I need to be in Netflix. 

I'm now 30 years later assembling it, it's hard to say, what's your favorite picture while I shot this 30 years ago, but I'm shooting it today. 

I don't, I can't even put my finger on it. 

[00:44:35] Matthew Holliday: that's fair. I think the one that I think the one that I think best kind of illustrates to me, or mix of comedy and erotica is on your FetLife profile, the woman in the bathtub, the bubble bath, and then just like a shark fin. 

[00:44:48] Kurt Krueger: Oh yeah. It came from beneath the bubbles. 

[00:44:53] Matthew Holliday: And just in my mind, I'm humming jaws, like duh. 

[00:44:57] Kurt Krueger: Yeah. They came from beneath the bubbles. Yeah. That's. Get your books. I'll just tell you very quickly. One I had intend to do, I have five of them in the works simultaneously. All right. As I added back through everything and they're going to range, each book is going to be a step up and range. 

So the first one's gonna be fine. Our news, the second one's going to be your erotic, the second next one is going to be erotic with me. Next one's going to be x-ray to the adults. And we'll just keep stepping it up. The problem is I've shopped too much for each of those. I may have to divide those down. 

My additional idea when I launched the idea of all these books and I've shot, various things. I shot 10 last 14 years in Florida. So that's, what's included in these my initial thing since my company was braised and eventually I'm going to have a book called brazen images. And what I'm gonna do on that is go back to the 1970s and eighties. 

And nineties where I did all the photography for those adult greeting cards and revamped them a bit, spruce them up and that's going to be brazen images, all the stuff I shot back then. So it's retro. But suppose so for these books, my initial thing was to do fun knockoff titles, like how the brazen images, Bri, the brazen images, revenge, a grazing images, those kinds of things. 

But my thinking has shifted recently. And that's what you had mentioned to me. That I categorize things under my photos. This comes from this portfolio, that portfolio. That's what I was thinking when I did that. But I'm thinking now I have better titles for each one of them. So we'll see. I'm not sure what they're going to be called, but I have a pretty good idea, but I'm going to have to, actually, I print out the four by four pictures per sheet, as I complete them. 

And as a stack of pictures, I need to cut them, lay them all out at the table. See what goes, where. And then that's when we'll decide the title. 

[00:46:48] Matthew Holliday: All right. Where can everyone find you online? If they want to follow you? 

[00:46:52] Kurt Krueger: Again, my main site is deviant art because I refuse to pay for one. That's going to disappear when I croak. And there, my name is simply Kurt Kruger. That's capital K U R T capital K R U E G E R. Just one word, Kurt Kruger. And my. More adult stuff. That's all explicit, but you can't do certain things on there. 

So the things that I can't do on there go to FetLife and FetLife is the same thing. Kurt Kruger with an underscore between church and Krueger. 

[00:47:22] Matthew Holliday: All right. And with that, we are done. Check us out@thensfwphotographypodcast.com on Twitter is at NSFW photography, Instagram at the NSFW photography podcast, and liking subscribe at your favorite podcast app. Keep making art, Keep sharing art.